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Post-doctoral Research Assistant in Evolutionary Genomics of Wild and Domestic Pigs |
PalaeoBARN |
The School of Archaeology, South Parks Road, Oxford |
Grade 7: Salary in the range £32,236 - £38,460 p.a. |
Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Research Assistant position as part of a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) grant entitled: “The Consequences of Gene Flow between Wild and Domestic Populations during Livestock Evolution”.

Search all news

Post-doctoral Research Assistant in Evolutionary Genomics of Wild and Domestic Pigs |
PalaeoBARN |
The School of Archaeology, South Parks Road, Oxford |
Grade 7: Salary in the range £32,236 - £38,460 p.a. |
Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Research Assistant position as part of a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) grant entitled: “The Consequences of Gene Flow between Wild and Domestic Populations during Livestock Evolution”.

The arrival of Europeans to the Americas, beginning in the 15th century, all but wiped out the dogs that had lived alongside native people on the continent for thousands of years, according to new research published today in Science.
But one close relative of these native dogs lives on in an unexpected place – as a transmissible cancer whose genome is that of the original dog in which it appeared, but which has since spread throughout the world.
Using genetic information from 71 archaeological dog remains from North America and Siberia, an international team led by researchers at the University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Queen Mary University of London, and Durham University showed that ‘native’ (or ‘pre-contact’) American dogs, which arrived alongside people over 10,000 years ago and dispersed throughout North and South America, possessed genetic signatures unlike dogs found anywhere else in the world.

A recent paper by the Palaeobarn team has challenged the mythology surrounding the domestication of rabbits, widely held to have occurred around 600AD after a decree by Pope Gregory allowed fetal rabbit meat to be eaten during Lent. Published in Ecology & Evolution, the paper outlines a much more complex picture of rabbit domestication as a continuum, rather than a short series of historically localised events.

Congratulations to doctoral candidate Evan Irving-Pease, who won the student presentation prize at the 7th Archaeozoology, Genetics, and Morphometrics Working Group Meeting (ICAZ) held at the University of Liverpool, 13-15 October 2017.